It is either that or acquisition, and we would prefer an IPO.

Speaking from the experience of 8 acquisitions/IPOs, your compensation structure will not survive public ownership. It could survive a PE acquisition, but definitely not public ownership (in my experience). I would recommend petitioning for a dual-class share structure to protect founding leadership.

We agree that we don't know what the future holds, and what makes sense for early stage companies may not make sense for later ones. When anything stops working, we'll make changes. You can see this already with the secondary structure for sales. We have a while before we need to worry about that, though :)

Because VCs need to have a way to sell their shares within the (limited) lifetime of their fund.